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7 Answers
7

One color:

Most decks with a single color are not competetive in tournaments (due to the fact you're settling for the top ten cohesive cards in a color instead of two sets of the top five in two colors. The difference in power level between the top 1-5 and the top 6-10 can be massive and game deciding. The other colors also make up for each others weaknesses.) But they do exist, and are referred to as "Mono X".

Mono red

Mono black

Mono blue

Mono green

Mono white

Two color:

Each of these corresponds to a guild of Ravnica. Since the guilds were released (and especially now that we've returned!) the color pairs have become common names for duo-color decks. Both allied and enemy color pairs are common to see, although allied more so (due to higher deck cohesion).

Red + white = Boros

Red + black = Rakdos

Red + green = Gruul

Red + blue = Izzet

White + black = Orzhov

White + green = Selesnya

White + blue = Azorius

Black + green = Golgari

Black + blue = Dimir

Green + blue = Simic

Three color:

The first of these are the shards of Alara. They jive well because they give two sets of allied colors each. The less commonly used are the enemy colors of the dragons of Planar Chaos, or the volver cycle from Apocalypse. Having only one allied color pair (the two enemies of a single color will be allied) limits deck cohesion, making their use infrequent.

More typically, enemy three color decks are not full fleshed out in the colors. You're more likely to have an "Izzet splashed with green" deck than a "Ceta" deck.

In addition, it's especially common for red + blue + green and black + blue + green to be called by their abbreviations — "RUG" and "BUG" — because these are names that are easy to remember and pronounce.

Four color:

Most decks do not have four full colors. As with three color enemies, if they reach this many colors, it's a shard with a slash of another color. So you're more likely to see something like "American splash black" instead of "Yore". The names are based on the Nephilim cycle from Guildpact.

White + blue + black + red = Yore or Yore-Tiller (infrequent)

Green + white + blue + black = Witch or Witch-Maw (infrequent)

Blue + black + red + green = Glint-Eye (infrequent)

Red + green + white + blue = Ink-Treader (infrequent)

Black + red + green + white = Dune or Dune-Brood (infrequent)

Five color:

Decks with all five colors usually revolve around a single combo that they hope to pull off. It takes a lot of mana fixing and a massive amount of playtesting to get a reliable five color deck. For this reason, you don't often find them in tournaments. You find them often in Commander (giving the player access to every card ever, greatly increasing the power level of the deck) and in skill challenges where a player just tries to come up with a crazy deck idea to see if he can make it work. Obviously there's only one five color deck, it uses all five:

Rainbow/Domain/Five-Color

Sometimes, four color decks will also be called Rainbow just because they have so many colors.

No colors:

Sometimes, particularly in formats with a very large card pool, you'll see colorless decks as well. The most common name for these is a reference to the old card frame for artifact cards:

Mono brown (not to be confused with BrownTown which is a draft deck leaning heavily on minotaurs)

I have always been under the impression that five-color decks are referred to as "Domain" decks. Beyond that, great job pulling everything together for all color combinations. +1
–
SocioMattMar 21 '13 at 15:52

I think it's useful to note RUG, BUG, and "5-Color" as the most typical labels for decks of those types (different from just color names because you see deck names like "NO RUG") -- mind if I edit that in?
–
Alex PMar 21 '13 at 16:11

@AlexP I haven't seen it in usage, at least in salvation forums or daily mtg columns. But making whatever words from "RGBUW" would be consistent with the MtG player mindset, so I believe it exists. Go ahead and edit them in (with a small bit about what RGBUW mean) and might as well throw Domain in for five color as well.
–
corsiKaMar 21 '13 at 17:09

3

Okay, I thought this was a silly question, but +1 just for insane levels of completism :)
–
thesunneversetsMar 21 '13 at 18:16

1

We always used to call Black and Blue decks "bruiser decks", back in the day.
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ire_and_curses♦Mar 21 '13 at 20:18

As noted by others, the 'aligned' color triplets - that is, those that consist of a color and its two siblings to either side on the usual Black-blUe-White-Green-Red color wheel - have nicknames (but not formal names!) based on their 'shards' in the Shards of Alara block: Esper (Ubw), Bant (Wug), Naya (Gwr), Jund (Rgb), and Grixis (Bru).

As for the non-aligned color triplets (which of necessity are one color and its two enemies), the 'dragon' scheme that Lee Abraham mentions based on the names of the dragons that were in Planar Chaos (Intet for Urg, Oros for Wrb, Vorosh for Gub, Numot for Rwu and Teneb for Bgw) is one that I've seen; the other (and slightly more common, at least in the playgroups I play with) is based on the 'shards' that were in Apocalypse, the original 'enemy colors' set - there's a consistent name there that's used on both enchantments
and creatures that care about the enemy-color combinations. That set is:

Those are the names. Not widely-used, though. Just saying "WBR" will get you much more recognition.
–
Alex PMar 20 '13 at 19:43

2

I agree with Alex fully on that point. They may accurately suggest the colour combination, but they have no actual terminological "currency" among most Magic players.
–
thesunneversetsMar 21 '13 at 11:36

I will stick with Dega. Sounds awesome.
–
wesdfgfgdMar 21 '13 at 13:07

I would go so far to say that the shards (and guilds, which are sadly missing from this answer) are formal names. They are routinely referred to by shard and guild by wizard's employees in their Daily MTG columns.
–
corsiKaMar 21 '13 at 15:49

@corsiKa Where this gets a bit annoying is that they're also archetype names. "Jund" is a thing beyond just being a BRG deck. Ditto not every Esper-colors deck in Standard is "Esper control."
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Alex PMar 21 '13 at 16:28

The problem with the "secondary" language is that that's not how most decks with these names actually play in practice. Many Jund decks often get more from its BG axis than its red part, for instance.
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Alex PFeb 10 '14 at 17:22

Oros (and the other dragons in the same cycle) is not an Elder Dragon. "Elder" is a creature type, and there are 5 Elder Dragons represented as cards: Arcades Sabboth (Bant), Chromium Rhuell (Esper), Nicol Bolas (Grixis), Palladia-Mors (Naya), and Vaevictis Asmadi (Jund). The five Elder Dragons are siblings in the storyline, survivors of the Elder Dragon Wars, and Nicol Bolas is the last (known) living Elder Dragon in the "present" time of the story. The Elder Dragons are ancestors of all other dragons, or at least those on Dominaria.
–
Brian SFeb 11 '14 at 18:56

Other answers have addressed the 3 color combinations (aka Allied colors correspond to the Shards of Alara and Enemy colors are much less clear) but the two color combinations correspond to the guilds of Ravnica: